Heather W. Petty's new novel is Lock & Mori.From her Q & A with Miss Print:
MP: What was the inspiration for Lock & Mori? What drew you to Sherlock Holmes as source material?--Marshal Zeringue
HP: I read an article on nemesis relationships, where the writer mentioned offhand that everything we know about Moriarty is what Sherlock tells us. He’s the only one who meets Moriarty in the canon. Those kinds of gaps are like chocolate cake to writers. Pretty much any time I can ask the question “What if?” I get super excited. In this instance, I thought, what if Sherlock lied to Watson for some reason? What if he’d known Moriarty since they were kids? What if something that happened when they were kids is why they’re rivals as adults? The story kind of spiraled out from there.
MP: Working off the last question, in the original stories, Moriarty is a villain. Period. What drew you to Moriarty as your narrator and protagonist? How did you go about reframing a villain as the hero of her own story?
HP: The whole idea of taking the characters back to their teen years creates an opportunity to reverse engineer a master detective and master criminal to who they might have been before. And really, Sherlock has been...[read on]